Computers are Social Actors
A CHI '94 paper establishing, across five experiments, that people apply human social rules and responses to computers automatically — even though they know computers are not human. It founded the 'Computers Are Social Actors' (CASA) research paradigm underpinning much later work on anthropomorphism and parasocial response to interactive systems.
Publisher
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '94), ACM
Published
24 Apr 1994
Added
1 week ago
Key Findings
- Social responses to computers (politeness, reciprocity, in-group bias) are commonplace and easily elicited.
- These responses do not stem from a conscious belief that the computer is human, nor from user ignorance or psychological dysfunction.
- Human-directed social scripts are triggered by social cues in the machine (language, interactivity, role-taking).
Methodology Notes
Five-experiment HCI study (CHI '94, pp. 72–78, 24 April 1994). Author, venue, and DOI verified via Crossref; ACM Digital Library serves a challenge to automated fetchers. Disambiguation: the canonical full paper is DOI 10.1145/191666.191703 — a separate DOI (10.1145/259963.260288) is the shorter CHI '94 Conference Companion version. The book-length companion work, Reeves & Nass, 'The Media Equation' (1996), is noted as related rather than logged separately.
Sources
CHI '94 Proceedings (ACM Digital Library) (primary)
Archived snapshot (Wayback Machine) — preserved against link rot
Authors
Clifford Nass, Jonathan Steuer, Ellen R. Tauber
Tags
Cite This
APA
Clifford Nass, Jonathan Steuer, Ellen R. Tauber (1994). Computers are Social Actors. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '94), ACM. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/191666.191703
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